How to keep the windows install dialog from popping up in .NET?

Answer 1

Your application would need to be certified by microsoft.

Answer 2

User Account Control, as it says at the bottom of the dialog, but you don't want to do. No other way. Either that or get it signed/certified? :)

Answer 3

You need a code signing digital certificate from a certificate authority like Comodo or VeriSign. It's debatable how useful it is, though, because it only replaces this scary-looking warning with a slightly less scary warning (yellow alert vs red alert) that says "Publisher: " instead of "Unidentified Publisher" and still tells the user only to run it if they trust you.

I'm somewhat doubtful that the average user really notices the difference between the two warnings.

Answer 4

You'd need to design your installation such that it doesn't require administrative access to install, which essentially means that you'll need to install inside the user's home directory instead of ProgramFilesDir and write registry entries only to HKEY_CURRENT_USER. For more details on how do this with a .MSI package, see this article. Inno Setup also has some details on limited user installs.

I don't think Visual Studio's setup project builder is capable of producing packages that don't require administrator rights to install. In any case, Vista seems to assume that anything that looks like a Setup.exe needs elevation (and results in the prompt).

Code signing will not remove the prompt, it will only make it say "Program XYZ from Developer Name wants access to your computer" instead of "An unknown program wants access to your computer".